Jason Knade | All-American Boy / 2013 [music video]

the endless longing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Steve Grand (lyrics and music), Jason Knade (director), All-American Boy / 2013 [5 minutes] [music video]

 

Gay pop singer Steve Grand’s first hit brought him major attention, and with good reason. All-American Boy is a powerful narrative that outlines the experiences of nearly any young man, not yet sure what being queer is all about, but nonetheless having desires for the hottest and best- looking boy in his school. For me it was the senior football captain—who, in fact, may have been gay and offered me the opportunity, which alas as a high school freshman I was too frightened to accept, of finding out.

      For Grand it is a handsome straight boy at a party. Sure, he’d brought along his own girlfriend, but so did Grand; it was required as a cover. So one never knew for sure, and the way Grand’s “All-American Boy” keeps staring at him, perhaps it’s just possible that they might, for just one night, find love together.

     Drinking whiskey from the bottle, smoking numerous cigarettes, the moment his girlfriend (Ashely Lobo) leaves the bonfire for just a few minutes, Grand’s idol (performed by Nicholas Alan), joins him and the adventure begins when it appears to the young gay dreamer that anything is possible.

    Grand’s lyrics say it all. He reports that he chose the title because that was how his father always introduced his sons, as just “All-American” boys who were members of Boy Scouts, who worked hard, and received good grades at school.

     But in this narrative fantasy, the term takes on new meaning, as the boy becomes a kind of reiteration of the sexuality that popular straight boys often imbued in their nonchalant masculinity. Growing up in the fifties, I remember it well, boys white T-shirts (often the sleeves rolled up once, or if twice stashed with a pack of cigarettes) and denims, blonde or light brown hair (I preferred the darker haired and more hirsute types like the football captain). They stood out as tougher versions of someone like Tab Hunter, dangerous to approach yet self-conscious about their effect on someone like me; one had to be careful not to stare too long. But the longing never left one’s heart.

      Grand begins his song with a similar description:

 

Ripped Jeans, only drinks whiskey

I find him by the fire while his girl was getting frisky, oh

I say we go this road tonight

He smiles, his arms around her

But his eyes are holdin' me, just a captive to his wonder, oh

I say we go this road tonight

      In fact, Grand describes my very feelings in my own youth, and probably those of thousands of other such boys: the mix of longing and fear, possible reception and outright rejection. Grand notes in a BuzzFeed interview that the song was inspired by the negative experiences he encountered as a gay male throughout his adolescence, including conversion therapy:

 

“I needed to do something to share the ache and share the pain that I've felt for most of my life. This is the story I wanted to tell. This is who I want to be. I owe that. I owe that to all the people who have felt this.”

 

     Yet, in the famous chorus of this ballad, he throws caution to the wind, almost demanding that his fantasy comes true for once:

 

“Be my All-American boy tonight

Where everyday's the Fourth of July

And it's alright, alright

And we can keep this up 'til the morning light

And you can hold me deep in your eyes

It's alright, alright

So be my, be my

All-American boy"

     And in this song he almost gets his way, as the boy, his girlfriend, and Grand escape the part in an auto, the boys getting on well, while the girlfriend becomes peeved; and when they stop to toss what appears to be a small tennis ball, she drives away by herself, leaving Grand and the man of his dreams alone.

    They trudge down the dirt path to a small lake which they both know about (this is after all Wisconsin, where lakes are everywhere). The boy strips and dives in, leaving the handsome Grand to think about what it might mean if he does the same.

     He does, and like heterosexual boys everywhere rough house for a moment before separating. But this time when Grand returns for more of the same, while also moving in for a kiss, almost covered over in the video with a montage of all the scenes leading up to it.

      The All-American boy, however, pulls away, startled, somewhat disgusted, leaving the water and Grand to find his own way back to the party.

       When Grand does return, his idol is with a new girl (Regina Marie). As the others enjoy the bonfire, his “All-American boy” attempts to draw Grand back into the festivities, hinting that he’s okay with what happened, that it didn’t really matter.

       But, of course, it did very much matter to the singer, who hovers in open shirt, separated from the celebrating crowd, knowing that his longing can never be fulfilled, that he will once more go to bed alone that night.

       All of this, some of which was recorded in Grand’s own basement with a bass guitar, drums, and with Grand himself on the piano.

       If the music isn’t at all innovative and doesn’t even begin to challenge our ears, it works stunningly, nonetheless, with the narrative and cinematic images to make this a truly important music video, done on what in the music video business is a dime, about $7,000 paid for entirely by Grand.

 

Los Angeles, July 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Robert Metson | Ticking Boxes / 2020

dynamite

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Metson (screenwriter and director) Ticking Boxes / 2020 [8 minutes]    

 

Like so many gay men still locked in a heterosexual marriage, Matthew Reynolds (Robert Douglas Metson) spends much of his time lying to his wife, Jennifer (Mega Greaves), creating business problems that will last him through the night, or making imaginary business trips during which he can steal away a few hours with another gay or, in the case of Ryan Baptiste (Shaun Cowlishaw), a pan-sexual man.

    Unlike so many short-lasting sexual encounters Matthew hooks up with, Ryan is honest and calls Matthew on his hiding behind marriage when he notices the ring on his friend’s finger. Matthew could have perhaps, like “ticking off boxes,” escaped any of the reality of Ryan’s observations as well, but this night in he was finally told off and engaged in a fight, not because Ryan necessarily disapproved of bisexuality, but because of Matt’s inability himself to know who he was. Matthew even removed the ring in hopes that it would not impede the sex he was sure to come.

    Not only does Matthew come home with a black-eye, however, but Ryan sends a packet to Jennifer in which he has enclosed the wedding ring that Matthew has taken off when he recognized Ryan’s disapproval.

     As the IMDb brief summary correctly comments, the “illusion of his idyllic life begins to crumble,” or more rightly we might describe it as quickly collapsing on him a bit like the roof of a house in an earthquake. Such relationship don’t just crumble, they always explode like dynamite.

      Suddenly there are no lies he can tell, nothing to fully explain away the red and black swelling under his eye, or certainly not a marriage ring arriving via special delivery.

      In fragmented glimpses of what happened last night, we see Ryan trying to tell the shallow, self-infatuated Matthew that “deep-down” he was unhappy; as Ryan argues to his friend, “You can’t just force yourself on people,” a comment to which he might have added, “in order to play out your fantasy about who you really are.”

    When Jennifer finally demands an explanation, recognizing his half-hearted lies for what they portend, he is such a fearful coward that he cannot even speak. He hasn’t the language to even explain his transgressions to her and himself. As Jennifer packs up to leave, he still even then blames others: “I keep thinking I’ve been caught in a trap,” without recognizing that if it is a trap, it is one of his own creation.

      All he does perceive is that he was too scared to “tick outside the box,” the box being also one of his own making—and all those of his family, educators, and others who influenced his upbringing who had convinced him and themselves that life needed to be lived in a box—and into which he accordingly implanted both himself and his imaginary (but all too real) wife.

    As those who have read my other essays on gay men who remain duplicitously in straight relationships, I have little sympathy, just as I am still impatient about my own several years that I drooled over boys who might have been perfectly ready to help me come out. But like this film’s sad figure Matt, I too was frightened, too brainwashed, perhaps still too naïve to even realize that I needed to make a decision, that I could fulfill my sublimated and not so hidden desires simply by reaching out to touch and hold someone other than those I had been told were not properly available. But at least in my case it was the box that even more terrified me; my parents’ insistence that the girl I was pretend-dating was already their daughter-in-law, and my mother’s visit with her to a furniture store where together they conspired to pick the ugliest furniture in the place that would become the center pieces of “our” apartment or house. I was horrified by their full embracement of an event she and I had never even discussed and the kitsch values that both my mother and she represented. No box for me! It must have been at that very moment when I finally realized I was truly different and not just going through a stage in life from which I would eventually fly free of the ugly, self-hating cocoon my society had woven for me. I must have realized I was already a butterfly.

    British writer and director Metson’s version of this common scenario has been far better done in feature films such as Making Love (1982) and The Lost Language of Cranes (1991), to name just two earlier films in which gay men have had to face the mistakes of heterosexual marriage, even when, as those in these films, they still loved the women with whom they lived. But perhaps the good-looking white cis pretend hetero-boys who dominate this world, and who probably served as bullies to the gay boys all during high school, have seldom been better exposed.

 

Los Angeles, July 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

 

 

Chintis Lundgren | Toomas Beneath the Valley of the Wild Wolves / 2019 [animated short film]

finding their callings

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chintis Lundgren and Draško Ivezić (screenplay), Chintis Lundgren (director) Toomas Beneath the Valley of the Wild Wolves / 2019 [18 minutes] [animated short film]

 

Toomas, the central figure in Estonian Chintis Lundgren’s and Croatian writer Draško Ivezić’s animated film, is a hot wolf. His ass or tail in particular seems to grab the attention of nearly all who encounter him—so much so that you might almost say of him, as did Marcel Duchamp of his rendering of a mustachioed Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q ("Elle a chaud au cul" or “She’s got a hot ass”), in this case changing the pronoun.

     Toomas works at a well-paid engineering job, which he quickly loses since he refuses the advances of his female boss.

     Meanwhile, his wife Viivi, with two brats to care for and another on the way, seeks out how to become “empowered.” She joins the empowerment seminar to “reclaim her life.”

     Her husband, home from his former job, hides the tools of his trade in a closet, and soon after begins to realize that he must keep his job loss and the reasons for his being fired from his family.

     After an endless wait at the unemployment office for his number 9987 to be called, the woman behind the counter explains that they haven’t had any jobs for engineers for years. But, she asks, “Are you good at fixing things?”

     Viivi, meanwhile, visits The Church of Female Empowerment. She decides to attend a meeting, but when she offers up her debit card for a ticket, she is told that the account has insufficient funds.

    Toomas, in the meantime, shows up to the door to which he was sent by Natasha in the unemployment office. The lady of the house, drink in hand, claims she needs her washer fixed, but when the sexy wolf leans over to check it out, she cannot keep her hands of his “tail,” despite his protests; and soon she is all over him with her claws.

     Toomas once again escapes the arms of the female aggressor. But showering back at home, Viivi tells him that she has signed up for yoga class, and he is forced to lie once more: “The wages are a bit late, dear.” Her response: “But you did for the children’s field trip, right?”

     Now Toomas has no choice but to go into the “fix up” business, visiting a willing lamb, who sits him down to tea, and when he asks for the “machine,” hands him a small stack of cash. In bed, with him later, she reports that she has other friends who “need fixing.”   

   At the next family meal, Viivi and her two children sit eating soup without their husband and father, he obviously still engaged with the lamb.

   When he finally enters after 6:00, the children run to him as usual, while Viivi asks, “Have you been drinking?” He’s brought her flowers and a card into which he’s clipped money for her yoga class.

   On his next “fixing” job his customer is no longer a feline or lamb, but an older tom cat, and soon after leather-clad boy pussies. The tom cat wonders has he ever considered show business. Viivi wonders the next morning why he hasn’t already left for work.

   She visits the head of the women’s empowerment organization, who treats all those of another gender as slaves, several of them even holding up the furniture. The lady with a whip commands her servant Žorž to attend to her guest, as he bows before Viivi, declaring “It’s my fault,” while the pregnant mother, whip in hand, beats him.

     Toomas has now been cast in a movie director by Alejandro Hardon, wherein his major line is “Where shall I put it…?” When he’s handed a dildo, Toomas asks, “What is this?” followed by his major line, which so excites Hardon that he declares they should go to the desert.

     In his major scene, Toomas stands leaning over the trunk of a car as cowboys come up behind him, Toomas pulling out of the trunk the dildo, and asking them, “Where shall I put it Antonio?” Hardon is delighted with the shot!

     Viivi stands washing up dishes when the doorbell rings; it’s Žorž bringing her flowers. As he sits at the table, looking around the room, he observes garbage in the overflowing can, the broken plate she dropped when the doorbell rang, and suggests “It looks like you need some help.” She suggests that perhaps he could help her, but his answer is, “But I don’t want to.” Suddenly, with whip in hand, we know Viivi will finally get what she is asking for.

    At the cast party for Toomas’ movie, Hardon declares not only that the film’s trailer is out, but that it will be a big hit. He demands a kiss, but Toomas, finally fed up, storms off with the words “I am done!”

   As the director declares, however, “Nobody say no to Alejandro!!!” We watch him take out his gun, put on his bullet belt, and shoot up his car, the film, and even the cast as, with a group of Mariachi singers in the back seat, he drives off to the city to where Toomas has now returned.

    Chased down by Hardon and his band, Toomas escapes into an alley, returning home to admit that he lost his job at the very moment that Viivi is beating Žorž, he responding, as trained, “It’s my fault.”

    By accident, Viivi’s foot turns on the television showing the trailer of Toomas film, and at the next moment, her water breaks. Toomas scoops her up his arms and rushes out of the house only to be met by Alejandro Hardon and his Mariachi performers.

     In the next few frames, we see Toomas and Viivi sitting in the front seat with Alejandro at the wheel, obviously rushing them to the hospital. He responds, “It’s my fault.”

     But in the next scene, we see the new baby ensconced in a playpen with his siblings playing nearby. Toomas is writing something at his drafting table, and Viivi sits, whip in hand, speaking to a TV audience while Žorž serves up coffee to both Viivi and Toomas.

     Finished with what he was writing, Toomas now posts it to his door: “Toomas. Deluxe Plumbing.”

     It appears that both he and his wife have finally found their true callings in our contemporary society.

   This surprising and idiosyncratic animated film belongs on a double bill, I’d argue, with Lenny Bruce’s and Jeff Hale’s Thank You Mask Man.

     My only regret is that these two writers and animators employed the worst stereotypes, from decades ago as well, of feminism and of what the hetersexual male really desires. Female self-empowerment does not mean turning men into slaves; and sex workers generally do not suddenly become leering sex fiends. At least Toomas remains true to Viivi, and obviously he cares for his family.  

 

Los Angeles, July 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).